"...and on our children!"

Matthew 27:25 is a painful text in the history of western Christendom, as it has been used to justify the persecution of Jews in Europe. Didn’t they cry out: “His blood is on us and on our children?” Every year, when the Gospel was read on the Friday before Easter, people thought of the Jews how had killed are sweet Lord.

But the author of Matthew, we believe, was a Jew and not one who hated his people. Remember how he wrote that Joseph had to call Mary’s son Jesus, “because he will save his people from their sins.” And this Matthew wrote in the middle of a war that led to the destruction of Jerusalem and left the house of God in ruins. As he wrote, millions of Jews were killed and enslaved. Matthew was convinced that Jesus would come now to save his people.

So are we missing the point?

Let's start as Pilate

Perhaps you can imagine yourself as Pilate, the Roman governor of Palestine. Normally, you reside in the Hellenistic harbour city of Caesarea, named for your emperor. Normally, you can leave the management of Jerusalem and Judaea to the High Priest and his council. But every major feast you take a detachment of soldiers to go to Jerusalem, where you reside in the palace of their last king, Herod the Great, and where you ceremoniously hand the locked-up ceremonial garments to the High Priest, to remind him that the Romans are ultimately in charge. But today will turn out to be far from normal.

What do you feel when on the morning of the feast, these Jewish leaders bring you a Galilean prisoner that they want you to condemn to death for them? You know from your officers and informants that the man has a following and disturbed the priests commercial business in the temple. You also know that the communities could send complaints against you for roughing up some religious pretender of theirs. Why do they want you to take responsibility? Can’t they just flog the man and be done with it? It is not like he killed a Roman soldier or disturbed Roman property, like Barabbas and his gang. And what do you feel when this man is not afraid of you, when he does not answer to the proofs his accusers bring? Are your irritated? Are you intrigued? And then there is this message from your wife: what does it mean? How does it affect you, or her? You try to manipulate the situation, so that Jesus will be released or, if not, that the people of Jerusalem will not be able to blame you for his death. In the end, they want Jesus crucified, and force you to release that bastard Barabbas. So you give Jesus to your soldiers to make a bit of fun with him and utterly disgrace the ‘king of the Jews’ in front of his people. How does that make you feel? What will you tell your wife tonight?

Now as Jesus

Jesus already knew his life was at risk. After the death of John the Baptist, Jesus had no reason to be optimistic. John had seen a clash coming between the Jewish people and the Roman empire. John had called the people and priests to repent and form an alliance for justice, so God could fill his temple with grace rather than with judgment. But his head ended up on the plate of a princess during a jet-set party. Jesus too expected a war that would leave Jerusalem and its temple in ruins. During his penultimate visit to Jerusalem, just before he took cover, he castigated the religious leaders for their hypocrisy which can lead only to more violence and bloodshed (Matthew 23:29-38):

“Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You build tombs for the prophets and decorate the graves of the righteous. And you say, ‘If we had lived in the days of our ancestors, we would not have taken part with them in shedding the blood of the prophets.’ So you testify against yourselves that you are the descendants of those who murdered the prophets. Go ahead, then, and complete what your ancestors started! “You snakes! You brood of vipers! How will you escape being condemned to hell?

Therefore I am sending you prophets and sages and teachers. Some of them you will kill and crucify; others you will flog in your synagogues and pursue from town to town. And so upon you will come all the righteous blood that has been shed on earth, from the blood of righteous Abel to the blood of Zechariah son of Berekiah, whom you murdered between the temple and the altar. Truly I tell you, all this will come on this generation.

Jerusalem, Jerusalem, you who kill the prophets and stone those sent to you, how often I have longed to gather your children together, as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings and you were not willing. Look, your house is left to you desolate. For I tell you, you will not see me again until you say, ‘Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord.’ ”

For Jesus, the inability of leaders to take responsibility for the collateral damage of their policies is driving further bloodshed. Matthew deliberately insert the image of blood into the trial of Jesus. Pilate washes his hand to deny his responsibility, whereas the people cry out for it, even without understanding what it means. His manipulation does not make his hands clean. With the Apostles' Creed, we say that Jesus was tortured, crucified and killed under Pilate. Pilate commanded the soldiers to whip Jesus, crown him with thorns and nail him to their cross. We will not let our leaders escape responsibility, when they say “the people made me do it.” The blood of the innocent is on their hands.

Nevertheless, Matthew also means to say that the people suffer oppression, war and destruction because they let themselves be manipulated by their leaders. Jesus wants to gather them ‘as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings,’ but they would not let him. His purpose remains to save his people, to spread a message of faith hope and love. If he is prevented from speaking it is time to pass it on to others. The last months of his life he spends preparing his friends to continue when he is gone. If he is to die, he is determined to make it count. He will not be robbed of his life by Herod or the Romans, but he will gift it to his friends to carry on. It is at the Passover in Jerusalem, when the people will celebrate their delivery from oppression and slavery in ancient Egypt, that he will confront the authorities, “for it is not right that a prophet should die outside of Jerusalem” (Luke 13:33).

Now with him at passover

On the evening before his arrest, while they celebrated the Passover meal, Jesus takes the role of the lamb in the story. The Lamb that was eaten to give the Israelites strength for the road ahead. The blood of the lamb that was used as a sign on the doorpost of the houses of those Israelites that were ready to leave Egypt behind and trust God’s message of a better life in the promised land. They would not perish but live. As we read in Matthew 26:26-29:

While they were eating, Jesus took bread, and when he had given thanks, he broke it and gave it to his disciples, saying, “Take and eat; this is my body.”
Then he took a cup, and when he had given thanks, he gave it to them, saying, “Drink from it, all of you. This is my blood of the covenant, which is poured out for many for the forgiveness of sins. I tell you, I will not drink from this fruit of the vine from now on until that day when I drink it new with you in my Father’s kingdom.”

The image sticks. John, Paul and Peter all call Jesus the (Passover) Lamb that takes away our sins. In the Book of Revelation it has become a part of who God is. In Greek, the word Pascha resembles the word for suffering in Greek and Latin. In Hebrew, however, Pesach refers to angel of death passing over the houses of the Isrealites marked with blood of the lamb, saving them from suffering. Jesus is the lamb that suffers to save his people from the power of Rome.

Jesus’s vision is that of Jeremiah 31-32: faced with the impending destruction of Jerusalem, the prophet sees a new covenant between God and man, a covenant of the heart, when no one needs to be taught about God anymore, “for they will all know Me … and I will remember their sins no more.” Pilate condemns him to death, but Jesus trusts that a higher judge will set him and his people free (I Peter 2:23). Jesus turns the brutality of the Roman empire and the manipulated blood-frenzy of the masses into an act of mercy and hope and love.

From the cross, he stretches out his bloodstained hands to the world: “Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing.” (Luke 23:34). Jesus shows his friends how to carry on his message of mercy even when the authorities try to silence him. Those who follow Jesus will make it count, they will continue his mission to save the people. They are his soulmates, his blood-brothers. They are bound together by the love of their beloved, by the new covenant that he wrote in his blood and on their hearts. That is blood, Matthew implicates, that you don’t want to wash off, - you wish for all the people to embrace it.

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Pilate was an accomplished man. He was of patrician descent, although not from the senatorial class (Rome’s 1% that lived in absolute wealth and divided the most influential positions among themselves). He had been top of his class in various military ranks when the emperor promoted him to the position of prefect of Palestine, ruling both the Samaritans and the Judeans. Normally this would be a position for two or three years in which you could get rich and return to Roman civilization. But Tiberius was a strange emperor, he left Pilate and his younger wife in this remote corner of the empire for ten years, arguing that corruption could be limited through limiting the number of governors. Pilate worked well with the longstanding Jewish High Priest Caiaphas, who was responsible for the internal and religious affairs of Judaea. His relationship with Herod Antipas, the ruler of the Galilee and son of Herod the Great and his Samaritan wife, was more complicated: Antipas wanted Tiberius to appoint him as king over Judaea and Samaria.

From a Roman perspective all seemed to be under control: ‘sub Tiberio, quies.’ ‘Judaea was quiet under Tiberius,’ writes the Roman historian Tacitus in his Histories explaining the events of the year after Nero’s death when the empire almost collapsed under a succession war, the Batavian-led Germanic uprising in the West, the Jewish revolt in the East and the threat of a Parthian invasion.
The Alexandrian Jewish philosopher Philo and the former Jewish rebel leader turned Roman historian Josephus disagree with Tacitus: the seeds of the clash between temple and empire were already sown during the governorship of Pilate. He was ‘ambitious,’ ‘merciless,’ ‘stubborn,’ writes Philo. Sub Pilato, people were tortured and killed in order to maintain the status quo that filled the coffers of the temple and the fiscus. Among these, both Tacitus and Josephus write, was a Jesus from Nazareth. To their surprise, his followers did not give up after his death, but spread his message across the empire.